


adjustments.

by ameliorates



Category: Star Wars Episode VII: The Force Awakens (2015)
Genre: Comforting, Dreams, F/M, Found Family, Friendship, Healing, Home, Love, M/M, Multi, Romance, Sleeplessness, basically just fml at this ot3, but nothing too implicit beyond one dream idk, hurting, implicit sex, people who are all broken in their own ways fixing each other in any way they can
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-12-30
Updated: 2015-12-30
Packaged: 2018-05-10 08:49:04
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,540
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5579081
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ameliorates/pseuds/ameliorates
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>they have come to the conclusion, slowly, and together, that they will never be fully healed. -- a jedistormpilot fic, exploring what it means to be wounded in very different ways.</p>
            </blockquote>





	adjustments.

**Author's Note:**

> i had already written part of this when i found out about the (i think) canon meeting between poe and rey in the tfa novelisation so i'm sorry this doesn't quite match up!!! also this is my first fic in forever/one of the longest fics i've ever written so full apologies for any clunkiness. i just love these three a stupid amount.

Rey prefers the company of rust and resilience, and so forges a home for herself in the pilot seat of the Falcon, limbs tucked to her chin, a shirt that she supposed must have belonged to Han, discovered in a compartment above the tertiary vents, draped across her shoulders. It becomes her nightly resting place, a funeral for Han played out in restless naps, short sputtering cries, and hushed silences. On Jakku grief was irrelevant. A pessimistic, hopeless thing that she had no purpose for, and so discarded as easily as worthless scrap. Now it wrings out her small body, leaving the whole of her hollow -- not unlike the worst of her desert hunger, but amplified, all consuming, and accompanied by a much greater degree of permanence. Waiting for her family had not ached quite so much. Tally after tally, portion after portion, a life in constant forward motion. But this was different: a static, stale loss. The bitterest of dead ends.

 

Visiting the med bay becomes her new daily routine, searching each time for something far more precious than busted ship parts. Finn’s body lies still but for the soft rise and fall of his chest, and yet simultaneously seems to exist within a state of flux -- not physically, not medically, just to her. Past the familiarity of his features she seems to find new, perhaps previously overlooked or perhaps merely unnoticed, elements to him each time she looks. His hands, when she takes them in hers, as she does, often, become more than merely hands. They are the mountain ranges she’s only seen from afar, full of deep crevices and calloused ridges, boasting strength and capability and sheer magnificence. She can’t fully remember, but she imagines that his eyes, when she finally sees them again, will be as deep as lakes, deep enough to swim in, eyes that a desert scavenger would certainly -- and in her case, _gladly_ \-- drown in.

 

Metal grid floors strain and clank under her weight as she makes her way to him once more, sending tinny reverberations ricocheting around the walls. She stops before she enters his room, her breath hitches, eyes shut tight, and a small prayer -- a will to the universe -- finds its way to her lips: _wake up this time_.

 

-

 

Poe Dameron’s face accommodates a frown well, much to the surprise of -- well, everybody really, considering the warmth that spills from him. With a face like that, it is hard to remember he is a soldier. With a face like that, it is hard to remember that he has brittle bones and crimson palms, stained with soot and war.

 

He remembers, of course. Or, to put it more accurately, he tries to forget, too, but when sleep calls and his eyelids grow heavy with the necessity of it all, it returns. Nightly flashes, blinding technicolour, ashy monochrome, a whisper to be brave, a steel face and a thumping skull. He wakes gasping, lungs hungry for air, a coat of sweat, slick and salty, sheening across his body. But it’s done, it’s done, it’s done --  the night has lasted and the terror, momentarily, subsided.

 

The other pilots won’t admit it, but there is something sickly comforting in knowing that your ship will one day, too, be your grave. It’s a certainty that you can hold in your palms, and cling to with white knuckles and a drumming pulse. He draws on that fact, when he needs to. Wrists restrained, muscles screaming, violated to his core, he had told himself _this is not the place you will die._ Except when escape came, when his body slotted neatly into the pilot seat -- as it does naturally for _any_ ship, regardless of make or alliance -- that fact churned in his stomach, as burning and raw as the heat of Finn’s back pressed against his own. If he is to die in the cockpit, he will not bring a passenger down with him. Later, he attempts to tell himself that resolve is what led to their survival, and if he can replicate it, no harm will come to them. In sleep, he’s reminded of the truth once more: it was dumb fucking luck.

 

Of course, another, far worse, reminder of that fact can be found three floors above his quarters, amongst acidic sterility and a gentle mechanic whirr of medical machinery, but he prefers not to think of that when it isn’t necessary to.

 

-

 

They meet in the mess hall. Her, half-starved, still, because regular mealtimes aren’t something she’s used to co-ordinating, because the unfamiliar dishes have left her pale and shaking and emptying her stomach once already and she doesn’t know how to ease herself into proper nourishment. Him, quiet, wanting to be alone, but lacking the selfishness to be so. He watches as she piles her tray, with bread, mostly, and a thick, ropey broth. His meal choice is far less complex: anything with a kick. He watches as she devours what she does have in sloppy bites, picking at her food with her hands, her mouth half open whilst chewing. He watches until he shouldn’t, at the point when he realises both how fascinating her mouth is and how easily his thoughts are straying to dangerous waters.

 

“Hey there. It’s Rey, right?” he says, as if the title of hero, saviour, warrior, hadn’t been firmly stapled to her forehead and broadcast round the entirety of the base. Rey nods, swallows, pushes the thought of his voice -- low, syrupy -- from her mind, and gestures for him to join her.

 

“Right. And you’re Poe Dameron. The best pilot we have, I hear.” Poe wishes she didn’t sound so goddamn pleased when she said that, wishes her eyebrows hadn’t perked up, that she hadn’t smiled with her whole mouth so blindingly brightly. He notices the ‘we’, too, the subtle but confident assimilation. _I am one of you_ , the curve of her lips say, and he would be a fool to question the authority behind it.

 

“That’s the one,” he says, cockish, grinning, showing no sign of his frustration.

 

Silence falls between them after that -- small talk isn’t Rey’s thing, and so she offers him a pale smile and dives back into her starchy meal.

 

It takes him eight whole minutes to break the silence. “You know, they have quite a variety of dishes on offer.” He begins to nod to her plain tray but realises his error before the sentence is even completed. Rey’s light, careless expression crumples to a scowl and her fists curl into themselves.

 

“My body isn’t used to anything other than desert rations,” she says simply, her eyes meeting him square. She adds hurriedly, “Yet,” as soon as she remembers that she has the opportunity to rectify that. The gist of her assertion, however, is clear. She is unembarrassed and unwavered, and does not consider her lacklustre childhood to be a character flaw. Poe ducks his head, embarrassed at his suggestion, floored by her conviction. “I -- right, of course. Sorry, ma'am, I should have thought.” His apology sounds suited to somebody of far greater rank than her, but Rey accepts it silently anyway, letting her features soften and continuing to eat her meal before it cools.

 

Later, when he leaves, she thinks she ought to have said something else. But for all the metal she had held under her palms, all the wires knotted around her wrists and the blaster force pushed against her chest, all her quick solutions and (at least in her head) lucky breaks, she still wasn’t quite sure how to shrug off her own isolation.

 

-

 

Poe dreams that night, but it is not in flashes or gasps. It is the weight of her hips, positioned across his, heavy and full and pressing down with need, her mouth open and twisting against his, her hands knotted in his fists, prising them open and clutching them close.

 

-

 

Rey dreams that night, of Finn and his broad figure, his capable hands, his swimming, bottomless eyes.  She dreams of him calling to her to wake, mirroring her own pleas to him. Dreams of Poe calling her to rest, placing a heavy palm atop her shoulder. She is spoilt by choice, unsure of who to follow, glad when she wakes in Han’s seat, glad that she wakes to a surety.  

 

-

 

It ends up that their second meeting is more of a collision. They are moons stuck in orbit ( _his_ orbit, Finn’s orbit, naturally) with overlapping paths, determined to intertwine and criss-cross about each other, like palm lines and flights paths and asteroid showers. And so they collide at his bedside, both sleepy and sleepless. They intersect at a point of wakefulness, having reached the early hours of the morning without slumber, they turn to their only other preoccupation: _him_. And so both leave, both walk, and both find themselves inches from his sleeping figure and a metre apart from each other.

 

“Oh -- sorry, I’ll let you --,” he begins, but is cut short by her telling him to stay. Her words sounds more like a sigh than a sentence but he’ll take it.

 

She pulls up two chairs, positions them a safe distance apart, and curls into the one closest to Finn. Neither of them speak. Or rather, Rey decides not to speak, and Poe is still reeling from his blunder earlier in the week, afraid that he’ll ruin her train of thought at best and cause her to leave at worst. And despite the awkwardness that currently sits between them, he most certainly does not want the latter to happen. For all that he’s supposed to be watching Finn, he lets his bedside manner slip and his eyes stray to the slouched shoulder of the woman in front of him. Her frame is half hidden from view, small enough to dip completely into the chair. Poe fixates on her milky flesh, notices the spattering of freckles there, finds himself wondering if years of desert living has left her skin leathery but can’t imagine feeling anything but softness if he touched her, as if she was somehow resilient the elements, as if she had refused to let herself be made coarse. Rey feels his gaze on her back and turns to meet it, her eyes lacking the defiance they held during their last meeting. She is not chastising him, merely mirroring his curiosity. And honestly, at this point, she has nearly convinced herself that she is something worth staring at -- Jedi blood thrums in her veins, a rarity this galaxy wasn’t sure it would see again. Underneath layers of sunbleached scraps and residual sand she is something Poe and his fellow resistance fighters have not had in a long time:  _hope_.

 

He apologises again and she rolls her eyes, tells him there’s no need, tells him she was staring too. A crooked smile dances on his lips and Rey is surprised to find herself a little gleeful at the sight.

 

The moment seems to repair past ills, but silence falls as it passes.

 

Finally, after an age: “What did it feel like, to be the first person he saw?”

 

Her eyes are on Finn, bright with wonder, lips curved in a kind of incredulity he’s never seen before.

 

Poe opens his mouth to refute her, to tell her that Finn had seen plenty of others before her, regardless of who or what they had been raised to become. But when he thinks on it further, he realises that Finn had been raised in a world of faceless numbers, of black eyed and sharp voiced masters, a world where recalcitrance was conditioned out of them, where emotion was substituted for marksmanship. His whole body shivers and sickens as he realises precisely what Rey means.

 

“A privilege,” comes his response, in the wake of the images that just flooded his mind. And then he repeats it, more firmly, proudly -- _a privilege_.

 

-

 

Finn takes another month to wake. When he does, the tears come thick and salty and fast, wetting each others shoulders as they clinch their bodies tight.

 

In the month it takes, their orbits intersect countlessly, Rey drawn to Finn and Poe drawn to Finn and then, without warning, Poe drawn to Rey and Rey, hesitantly and anxiously, drawn to Poe.

 

He still slips up, still: once joked about her arm coverings and the frequency with which she wears her clothes from Jakku, wondered aloud why she doesn’t visit the lakes to blow off steam with the rest of the resistance members, accidentally offers her his type of meal when she misses mess, forgetting that her tastes are still simple and felt a pang of guilt as soon as she spat it back onto the plate. But then, she is not the only person with weak spots and there are parts of him that she uncovers accidentally. She mentioned that she had never known her mother, and he winced because he had known his own, because she could not come back, because in the dead of night when only his shadow kept him company, he had selfishly wondered if the pain would have eased quicker had he never known her in the first place. Rey had talked of home, too, of Jakku, and the very word seemed to cause him to become smaller. He thinks of it in terms of binaries -- of good and bad, of the tree that he had grown up under, of the Empire’s frequent and crippling attacks, of her face and her smile and the hole she had left in him. And so they consider themselves equal: haunted and hurting and healing and all at once.

 

Finn takes a month to wake, and when he does, he’s greeted by a feast. He’s greeted by the general, by pilots who have listened to Poe’s enamored ramblings in raptures, greeted by a girl with her hair in three knots and a boy with a jacket with a messy, stitched up seam running through its spine that he hands to him, his palms sweaty, his throat tight but managing to get out the word _buddy_ before he starts to cry.

 

-

 

They have come to the conclusion, slowly, and together, that they will never be fully healed. Rey strips back her arm coverings for them one night, shows them the scratches dug into her flesh from years of metal and sand, tells them of wreckaged spaceships, of a wreckaged heart. Poe speaks her name: _Shara Bey_ , and tells the two of them, who do not know, what it was like to have a mother, even for the most fleeting of moments. And Finn just holds them close. Later touching, exploring, learning that a body in not a weapon, feeling the heat of flesh, the ache of proximity.

 

They wake, constantly, in the night, to the point where sometimes it’s hopeless even wishing for sleep -- but they are whole, they are human, and when they do find themselves sleepless, or jerking with a start, they are not alone. One of them will pull the other towards them, a warm arm wrapping around their body, tugging them closer.

 

And it reminds them, each time, that here is a place that they are allowed to make their home.


End file.
